| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: is but its passing phase from a vast impersonal on the one hand to
an equally vast impersonal on the other. Thus seers preached in the
past; so modem science is hinting to-day. With us the idea seems the
bitter fruit of material philosophy; by them it was looked upon as
the fairest flower of their faith. What is dreaded now as the
impious suggestion of the godless four thousand years ago was
reverenced as a sacred tenet of religion.
Shorter even than his short threescore years and ten is that soul's
life of which man is directly cognizant. Bounded by two seemingly
impersonal states is the personal consciousness of which he is made
aware: the one the infantile existence that precedes his boyish
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: some way to the modified form, but often affecting by correlation of growth
other parts of the organisation. In changes of this nature, there will be
little or no tendency to modify the original pattern, or to transpose
parts. The bones of a limb might be shortened and widened to any extent,
and become gradually enveloped in thick membrane, so as to serve as a fin;
or a webbed foot might have all its bones, or certain bones, lengthened to
any extent, and the membrane connecting them increased to any extent, so as
to serve as a wing: yet in all this great amount of modification there
will be no tendency to alter the framework of bones or the relative
connexion of the several parts. If we suppose that the ancient progenitor,
the archetype as it may be called, of all mammals, had its limbs
On the Origin of Species |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Pagan and Christian Creeds by Edward Carpenter: So we might go on rather indefinitely. I need hardly
say that in more modern and civilized life, relics of the totem
system are still to be found in the forms of the heraldic
creatures adopted for their crests by different families,
and in the bears, lions, eagles, the sun, moon and stars
and so forth, which still adorn the flags and are flaunted
as the insignia of the various nations. The names may
not have been ORIGINALLY adopted from any definite belief
in blood-relationship with the animal or other object
in question; but when, as Robertson says (Pagan Christs,
p. 104), a "savage learned that he was 'a Bear' and that
Pagan and Christian Creeds |
