| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: vision of metaphysical philosophy; and such a science when brought nearer
to us in the Philebus and the Republic will not be called by the name of
(Greek). Hence we see with surprise that Plato, who in his other writings
identifies good and knowledge, here opposes them, and asks, almost in the
spirit of Aristotle, how can there be a knowledge of knowledge, and even if
attainable, how can such a knowledge be of any use?
The difficulty of the Charmides arises chiefly from the two senses of the
word (Greek), or temperance. From the ethical notion of temperance, which
is variously defined to be quietness, modesty, doing our own business, the
doing of good actions, the dialogue passes onto the intellectual conception
of (Greek), which is declared also to be the science of self-knowledge, or
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Eryxias by Platonic Imitator: some gluttons: and gambling and the love of drink and greediness are all
desires?
CRITIAS: Certainly.
SOCRATES: But desires are only the lack of something: and those who have
the greatest desires are in a worse condition than those who have none or
very slight ones?
CRITIAS: Certainly I consider that those who have such wants are bad, and
that the greater their wants the worse they are.
SOCRATES: And do we think it possible that a thing should be useful for a
purpose unless we have need of it for that purpose?
CRITIAS: No.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Selected Writings of Guy De Maupassant by Guy De Maupassant: minds. We need men who can think and can talk, around us. When we
are alone for a long time, we people space with phantoms.
I returned along the boulevards to my hotel in excellent spirits.
Amid the jostling of the crowd I thought, not without irony, of
my terrors and surmises of the previous week, because I believed,
yes, I believed, that an invisible being lived beneath my roof.
How weak our mind is; how quickly it is terrified and unbalanced
as soon as we are confronted with a small, incomprehensible fact.
Instead of dismissing the problem with: "We do not understand
because we cannot find the cause," we immediately imagine
terrible mysteries and supernatural powers.
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