| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from God The Invisible King by H. G. Wells: within which they thought. Many of these makers of Christianity,
like Saint Ambrose of Milan (who had even to be baptised after his
election to his bishopric), had been pitchforked into the church
from civil life; they lived in a time of pitiless factions and
personal feuds; they had to conduct their disputations amidst the
struggles of would-be emperors; court eunuchs and favourites swayed
their counsels, and popular rioting clinched their decisions. There
was less freedom of discussion then in the Christian world than
there is at present (1916) in Belgium, and the whole audience of
educated opinion by which a theory could be judged did not equal,
either in numbers or accuracy of information, the present population
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: difficulties. We cannot receive his doctrine of opposites as the last word
of philosophy, but still we may regard it as a very important contribution
to logic. We cannot affirm that words have no meaning when taken out of
their connexion in the history of thought. But we recognize that their
meaning is to a great extent due to association, and to their correlation
with one another. We see the advantage of viewing in the concrete what
mankind regard only in the abstract. There is much to be said for his
faith or conviction, that God is immanent in the world,--within the sphere
of the human mind, and not beyond it. It was natural that he himself, like
a prophet of old, should regard the philosophy which he had invented as the
voice of God in man. But this by no means implies that he conceived
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Shadow out of Time by H. P. Lovecraft: illusions or accidents; but there was an element of dim, fumbling
terror about the way I thought they ran. For at one end of them
was the heap of cases which must have clattered down not long
before, while at the other end was the ominous trap-door with
the cool, damp wind, yawning unguarded down to abysses past imagination.
VIII
That my strange sense of compulsion was deep and overwhelming
is shewn by its conquest of my fear. No rational motive could
have drawn me on after that hideous suspicion of prints and the
creeping dream-memories it excited. Yet my right hand, even as
it shook with fright, still twitched rhythmically in its eagerness
Shadow out of Time |
