| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Lesser Hippias by Plato: not the same as the false?
HIPPIAS: Of course, Socrates.
SOCRATES: And is that your own opinion, Hippias?
HIPPIAS: Certainly; how can I have any other?
SOCRATES: Well, then, as there is no possibility of asking Homer what he
meant in these verses of his, let us leave him; but as you show a
willingness to take up his cause, and your opinion agrees with what you
declare to be his, will you answer on behalf of yourself and him?
HIPPIAS: I will; ask shortly anything which you like.
SOCRATES: Do you say that the false, like the sick, have no power to do
things, or that they have the power to do things?
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: PROTERVITAS of its varying direction - will always be more to us than
a railroad well engineered through a difficult country. No reasoned
sequence is thrust upon our attention: we seem to have slipped for
one lawless little moment out of the iron rule of cause and effect;
and so we revert at once to some of the pleasant old heresies of
personification, always poetically orthodox, and attribute a sort of
free-will, an active and spontaneous life, to the white riband of
road that lengthens out, and bends, and cunningly adapts itself to
the inequalities of the land before our eyes. We remember, as we
write, some miles of fine wide highway laid out with conscious
aesthetic artifice through a broken and richly cultivated tract of
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Research Magnificent by H. G. Wells: the same egotistical haste. . . ."
It is, I suppose, a part of the general humour of life that these
words should have been written by a man who walked the plank to
fresh ideas with the dizziest difficulty unless he had Prothero to
drag him forward, and who acted time after time with an altogether
disastrous hastiness.
2
Yet there was a kind of necessity in this journey of Benham's from
the cocked hat and wooden sword of Seagate and his early shame at
cowardice and baseness to the spiritual megalomania of his complete
Research Magnificent. You can no more resolve to live a life of
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