| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Phaedo by Plato: I will tell you, he said. The lovers of knowledge are conscious that the
soul was simply fastened and glued to the body--until philosophy received
her, she could only view real existence through the bars of a prison, not
in and through herself; she was wallowing in the mire of every sort of
ignorance; and by reason of lust had become the principal accomplice in her
own captivity. This was her original state; and then, as I was saying, and
as the lovers of knowledge are well aware, philosophy, seeing how terrible
was her confinement, of which she was to herself the cause, received and
gently comforted her and sought to release her, pointing out that the eye
and the ear and the other senses are full of deception, and persuading her
to retire from them, and abstain from all but the necessary use of them,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne: "Which is not to be feared," replied Nicholl.
"Who knows?" said Michel Ardan. "But, in admitting that the sun
does not go out, might it not happen that the earth might move
away from it?"
"There!" said Barbicane, "there is Michel with his ideas."
"And," continued Michel, "do we not know that in 1861 the earth
passed through the tail of a comet? Or let us suppose a comet
whose power of attraction is greater than that of the sun.
The terrestrial orbit will bend toward the wandering star, and
the earth, becoming its satellite, will be drawn such a distance
that the rays of the sun will have no action on its surface."
From the Earth to the Moon |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Madam How and Lady Why by Charles Kingsley: love and reverence and trust Fact and Nature, which are the will,
not merely of Madam How, or even of Lady Why, but of Almighty God
Himself, then we shall be really loving, and reverencing, and
trusting God; and we shall have our reward by discovering
continually fresh wonders and fresh benefits to man; and find it
as true of science, as it is of this life and of the life to come-
-that eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into
the heart of man to conceive, what God has prepared for those who
love Him.
Footnotes:
{1} I could not resist the temptation of quoting this splendid
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