| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Emerald City of Oz by L. Frank Baum: Before the Nome King stood the Chief of the Whimsies and the Grand
Gallipoot of the Growleywogs, surrounded by their most skillful
generals. Very fierce and powerful they looked, so that even the Nome
King and General Guph, who stood beside his master, seemed a bit
fearful in the presence of their allies.
Now a still more formidable creature entered the cavern. It was the
First and Foremost of the Phanfasms and he proudly sat down in King
Roquat's own throne and demanded the right to lead his forces through
the tunnel in advance of all the others. The First and Foremost now
appeared to all eyes in his hairy skin and the bear's head. What his
real form was even Roquat did not know.
The Emerald City of Oz |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Alkahest by Honore de Balzac: Vice and Genius too often produce the same effects; and this misleads
the common mind. What is genius but a long excess which squanders time
and wealth and physical powers, and leads more rapidly to a hospital
than the worst of passions? Men even seem to have more respect for
vices than for genius, since to the latter they refuse credit. The
profits accruing from the hidden labors of the brain are so remote
that the social world fears to square accounts with the man of
learning in his lifetime, preferring to get rid of its obligations by
not forgiving his misfortunes or his poverty.
If, in spite of this inveterate forgetfulness of the present,
Balthazar Claes had abandoned his mysterious abstractions, if some
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Euthydemus by Plato: nature of the proposition, nor extract hidden truths from the copula, nor
dispute any longer about nominalism and realism. We do not confuse the
form with the matter of knowledge, or invent laws of thought, or imagine
that any single science furnishes a principle of reasoning to all the rest.
Neither do we require categories or heads of argument to be invented for
our use. Those who have no knowledge of logic, like some of our great
physical philosophers, seem to be quite as good reasoners as those who
have. Most of the ancient puzzles have been settled on the basis of usage
and common sense; there is no need to reopen them. No science should raise
problems or invent forms of thought which add nothing to knowledge and are
of no use in assisting the acquisition of it. This seems to be the natural
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