| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Phaedo by Plato: which eye hath not seen nor ear heard and therefore it hath not entered
into the heart of man in any sensible manner to conceive them. Fourthly,
there may have been some moments in our own lives when we have risen above
ourselves, or been conscious of our truer selves, in which the will of God
has superseded our wills, and we have entered into communion with Him, and
been partakers for a brief season of the Divine truth and love, in which
like Christ we have been inspired to utter the prayer, 'I in them, and thou
in me, that we may be all made perfect in one.' These precious moments, if
we have ever known them, are the nearest approach which we can make to the
idea of immortality.
14. Returning now to the earlier stage of human thought which is
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: should at present so strongly recall it to my memory." He took his
flageolet from his pocket and played a simple melody. Apparently
the tune awoke the corresponding associations of a damsel. She
immediately took up the song -
" 'Are these the links of Forth, she said;
Or are they the crooks of Dee,
Or the bonny woods of Warroch Head
That I so fain would see?'
" 'By heaven!' said Bertram, 'it is the very ballad.'"
On this quotation two remarks fall to be made. First, as an
instance of modern feeling for romance, this famous touch of the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Unseen World and Other Essays by John Fiske: unite and break up--now here, now there--in their play on the
surface of a pool, and to this tremendous series of events we can
assign neither a beginning nor an end.
[3] Fortnightly Review, April, 1875.
We must now make some more explicit mention of the ether which
carries through space the rays of heat and light. In closest
connection with the visible stellar universe, the vicissitudes of
which we have briefly traced, the all-pervading ether constitutes
a sort of unseen world remarkable enough from any point of view,
but to which the theory of our authors ascribes capacities
hitherto unsuspected by science. The very existence of an ocean
The Unseen World and Other Essays |
