| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The People That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs: There was a chance that the Galus would receive me; but even
Ajor could not say definitely whether they would or not, and
even provided that they would, could I retrace my steps from
the beginning, after failing to find my own people, and return
to the far northern land of Galus? I doubted it. However, I
was learning from Ajor, who was more or less of a fatalist, a
philosophy which was as necessary in Caspak to peace of mind as
is faith to the devout Christian of the outer world.
Chapter 5
We were sitting before a little fire inside a safe grotto one
night shortly after we had quit the cliff-dwellings of the
The People That Time Forgot |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Theaetetus by Plato: II. The saying that 'All knowledge is sensation' is identified by Plato
with the Protagorean thesis that 'Man is the measure of all things.' The
interpretation which Protagoras himself is supposed to give of these latter
words is: 'Things are to me as they appear to me, and to you as they
appear to you.' But there remains still an ambiguity both in the text and
in the explanation, which has to be cleared up. Did Protagoras merely mean
to assert the relativity of knowledge to the human mind? Or did he mean to
deny that there is an objective standard of truth?
These two questions have not been always clearly distinguished; the
relativity of knowledge has been sometimes confounded with uncertainty.
The untutored mind is apt to suppose that objects exist independently of
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Extracts From Adam's Diary by Mark Twain: desist, and they would even have eaten me if I had stayed--which
I didn't, but went away in much haste. ... I found this place,
outside the Park, and was fairly comfortable for a few days, but
she has found me out. Found me out, and has named the place
Tonawanda--says it looks like that. In fact, I was not sorry she
came, for there are but meagre pickings here, and she brought some
of those apples. I was obliged to eat them, I was so hungry. It
was against my principles, but I find that principles have no real
force except when one is well fed. ... She came curtained in
boughs and bunches of leaves, and when I asked her what she meant
by such nonsense, and snatched them away and threw them down, she
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